That Good Night
by ArwenJaneLilyLyra
Summary: Truthfully, Arthur cannot even know for sure if he has ever known the real Eames. Perhaps by the time they shook hands as young men the splintering of Mister Eames had already begun. Or perhaps it was a predilection at birth, this inconsistency of him, as if he was made not of solid flesh and bone but of wet clay, never drying out, ever waiting to be moulded anew.


_Please note in particular there are a lot of references to suicide and general self destruction in this piece. Not all are explicit, but it's a major theme._

 _Also, when I say non-linear narrative, I really well and truly mean non-linear._

 **That Good Night**

 _Do not go gentle into that good night;_

 _Rage, rage against the dying of the light._

 _Dylan Thomas_

 **(dear heart, my bright)**

.

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In the end, Arthur pinches the needle into his arm properly on the third try. His hands are shaking.

Eames, now in his second hour of unconsciousness, doesn't flinch when Dom slides the needle into his wrist.

There is a plan, haphazard and cobbled from the patchwork of panic.

Arthur will go under. He will find Eames, before he slips away forever.

Arthur will go under. He will destroy the phantom that is eating Eames apart from the inside.

It starts months before this moment, though.

.

.

(It starts years before, if truth be told.)

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 **(denial)**

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There are signs.

Arthur ignores them.

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Dreamshare appeals to a variety of minds, but they all share a similar brand. It's something raw and desperate and brilliant. Those that survive beyond their first year, at least.

There are some minds that can survive it, and there are some that can thrive in it.

Arthur finds, however, that the ones that truly flourish are the world weary. There's catharsis to be found in being able to die over and over again.

'Are you suicidal?' he asks once, when the night's kiss has exposed them to one another.

His words are muffled by the wine and the pillow and the darkness.

Eames just smiles. He places his palm over Arthur's face. It is dry and warm, and his thumb lightly traces the cupid's bow of Arthur's lips. Then he closes his eyes.

'Eames,' Arthur says, louder this time.

Eames does not answer.

.

.

Arthur doesn't ask again.

(He probably should have asked again.)

.

.

Eames shifts like light through clouds.

It's radiant and seamless, and it would be glorious, too, only this isn't a dream. Every second of this inconstant flickering between faces is real and terrible, and Eames isn't changing his hair or his skin or the bones beneath it all anymore but change comes nonetheless, in his expressions and tones and words. Miniscule, terrifying.

He sheds snake skins with a muted glint in his eye or a tilt of his head. He melts out of one and into another.

Arthur sees the cracking of his expression as he is caught between worlds, between persons.

Eames is nobody, now, which hurts so much because to Arthur he has at least always been somebody.

He has been many things, an acquaintance, a colleague, a peer; briefly an enemy and sometimes a friend. Mostly he's been a lover.

But sometimes now Eames looks at him with a stranger's polite indifference, and sometimes when Eames is awake, really awake, he kisses him so fiercely, and unshed tears glitter in his eyes because he is frighteningly afraid of forgetting again.

Arthur remembers the last time he saw his mother. How she called him by his father's name, and then her own father's name, and then she called him Lucas, a name he'd never known but it was far too late to ask by then.

Sometimes when Eames is awake, really awake, they lie side by side on the bed, nose to nose, and they trace the lines of their slowly ageing faces, as if they have truly lived all the years that their dream time has amounted to, countless years, and Eames whispers in Arthur's ear:

'One day, you're going to have to let me go, darling.'

Arthur just shakes his head and strokes the long ridge of Eames' nose, and commits to memory all over again the scent of his lover's skin. Because Eames might forget everything for good one day, even his own name.

It only makes Arthur more determined to remember everything.

.

.

'Arthur,' Dom says before his front door is even fully open. 'Come in.'

It feels different, somehow. Arthur has long lost count of his visits to this house, has learned even to love the sound of screaming children clattering down the stairs, but this time there's no clattering, no screaming.

'What did you find?' Arthur asks, shaking off his coat and following his friend through the hallway and into the living room. 'Where are the kids?'

'On vacation with their grandparents,' Dom replies, gesturing to the sofa as he sinks into the armchair. 'It's all in here.'

He hands an envelope straight to Arthur, who grabs at it with a greed Dom's never seen before.

'Coffee?' he asks warily.

'Please,' Arthur replies without looking up from the first page of the file.

From across the open plan space, Dom keeps talking as he fills the kettle and starts rooting through his cupboards for the nice coffee grounds.

'I've got a good contact in the military. He was the one to contract me the first time, when I was building for them. He called me after the Fischer Job, managed to get me another job above board. He pulled a couple of strings.'

'What did you tell him?'

Arthur's voice is sharp, accusatory. Dom's heard it before, usually followed by the ruffling of paper or gunshots, depending on whether or not they're dreaming.

He's never heard directed at him, though, never so pointedly.

He stares at Arthur for a moment, takes in the bruising rings around his eyes and the bones of his face beneath his translucent skin. He wonders if this is how he looked, in the last days before Mal jumped.

A cold trickle of fear numbs his spine, and Dom returns to the mugs in front of him.

'Nothing important. And even if he suspects something, he won't investigate it. He knows all about the Somnacin experiments the military pulled. He didn't agree with them at the time, never mind now. He's had years to deal with the fallout.'

The kettle gurgles happily. Arthur turns his frown to the file again.

'The US trained its first forger about fourteen months after the UK, but it was under the instruction of the same guy. An Australian doctor called Stefan Cowling,' Dom continues. 'He was a real spiritual guy. The sort that was probably a psychic for the military in the Cold War.'

At the name, Arthur's entire frame seems to solidify, which is strange, because Dom hadn't realised he seemed anything less than utterly present before. He stiffens, sitting upright on the sofa and glaring at Dom so fiercely for a moment he's afraid.

'You know the name?' he assumes cautiously, eyes firmly trained on the kettle as he pours the boiling water.

Out of the corner of Dom's eye Arthur moves, but it's indistinguishable. Then he clears his throat and replies, 'Uhh. Yeah. I know it. Only heard it a couple of times, back in the military. Never met him. He was working a – special division.'

They do not mention that Somnacin itself was a special division. They do not linger over the potent horrors of a special division's very own special division.

An uncomfortable silence stretches before them, the lingering tuneless notes of a broken piano. Arthur accepts the coffee with a grateful sound and takes a long, scalding gulp.

He can feel Dom watching him, scrutinising him. He can't bring himself to protest, though he knows it's probably a lot like the looks he used to give Dom.

'Arthur,' Dom says after a moment, and his tone hovers somewhere between a warning and concern. 'If you want, I can come back with you. I can help. Phillipa and James won't be back for another twelve days, and if you need longer – I can always call Miles. If you need.'

Arthur's fingers cramp around his mug, and he sees only sincerity in Dom's face as he waits patiently for an answer.

He has never had any intention of asking Dom to pay him back for those two years he gave up in the name of the Cobb family. Not time or monetary reward, not even a bottle of champagne to say thanks.

But here is Dom anyway, offering an open palm, and for the first time in years Arthur finds that he not only needs help, but actually, he _wants_ it. He doesn't want to do this alone anymore.

'Yeah,' he says, a bubble of breath at most, strangled in the back of his throat. He swallows and blinks furiously. 'Please. I need your help. Eames – yeah. Please.'

.

.

When it happens, it happens so gradually, like the arduous teasing open of the slit in the chrysalis as the moth wrestles free, that Arthur cannot say for sure at what point he should have known.

There is so little certainty in dreams, the malleability of their matter and the very impossibility of their existence. Even the most mundane dream is nothing short of miraculous.

Truthfully, Arthur cannot even know for sure if he has ever known the real Eames. Perhaps by the time they shook hands as young men the splintering of Mister Eames had already begun. Or perhaps it was a predilection at birth, this inconsistency of him, as if he was made not of solid flesh and bone but of wet clay, never drying out, ever waiting to be moulded anew.

There were signs. Arthur ignored them.

Well, Arthur ignored many of them.

But there were others, ones Arthur had noticed and accepted and dismissed as the idiosyncrasies of Eames, never considering they might be weighted in his very being by such violent anchors.

Once upon a time Eames licked and kissed and nipped his way across every inch of Arthur's body, and a month later he blushed from the tip of his nose in every direction when Arthur's hand lingered a little too long and a little too high up on his thigh beneath a restaurant table, as if he were little more than a stranger.

Once upon a time Eames dedicated every second of his concentration for two months to training Arthur out of his bad language, and seven months later the words you fucking little cunt, and more to boot, left his lips in grit and hatred as he brought down projection after projection, waiting for their extractor to return. Arthur rolled his eyes and grinned, because Eames was a _fucking_ hypocrite, but the curses fell from his lips so elegantly he found he didn't care.

'I'm a consummate actor, darling,' Eames said once, with an elaborate flick of his hand. 'RADA couldn't handle me, so they pawned me off to dreamshare themselves.'

Arthur believed the first, and enjoyed the unlikely certainty of the second. He had seen others slip the slope laid down by Eames, knew he had probably stumbled a couple of times himself over the years. But the entirety of Eames was a lie bigger than even Arthur realised, and it was only with a twinge of longing pain, once it was too late to matter anyway, he conceded that couldn't have possibly _imagined_ the truth.

And the truth, when it comes, is beautiful and terrible.

One day Arthur walks into the bathroom – _the_ bathroom, not _Arthur's_ bathroom, not _Eames'_ bathroom, not quite _their_ bathroom yet – and he stops in the doorway, his hand tight on the handle.

Eames is standing in front of the mirror, scrutinising the minute details of his own face.

Arthur's about to chastise Eames for his vanity when he pauses, concerned, his words clinging to his teeth behind his lips.

The shower is on, scalding hot judging by the billowing steam that keeps fogging up the mirror. Eames is naked, and his body is scattered with lemon scented suds of the shower gel he hates, and his hair is sopping wet. His eyes are pink and watery.

'Eames,' Arthur says cautiously instead, but Eames doesn't hear him. His brow is creased and aside from battling the steamy mirror he keeps reaching up to touch his face, the way he sometimes does in the half hour of real time that follows a particularly difficult forge. But it's more hesitant than usual, as if he is not casually reassuring himself but is in fact very afraid of the shifting muscles of his own sad face.

He hasn't forged in a dream in over two weeks. Not that Arthur knows of, at least.

'Hey,' he says quietly, and places a hand on Eames' arm so that he's covering up most of an awkwardly spread and stretched tattoo – one of the less offensively terrible ones, Arthur had informed him once.

Eames had laughed at that at the time, unmoved by the criticism, but now he flinches, and finally looks away from his reflection to inspect the black ink peeking out from beneath Arthur's fingers.

He stares too long, and his mouth wobbles.

'I have tattoos,' he remarks after a moment, anxious and quiet.

'Yeah,' Arthur says warily. 'You have tattoos.'

'I don't…' Eames begins, but his eyes find Arthur's, and the rest of his words are lost as he takes a large shuddering gulp of air, and tears spill over his cheeks without warning or ceremony. He turns away, tries to wrench himself from Arthur's grip, but Arthur only tightens his hold.

'Eames,' Arthur stutters. Stutters and shouts and stutters again and again. But Eames' voice is a broken, cracking sound as he grasps Arthur's shirt and buries his face into Arthur's neck, as if to hide his own marked skin from sight.

He's unrecognisable in this unprompted grief.

He's crying.

Actually, he's _sobbing._

He's also soaking Arthur's clothes, but as they topple to the tiled bathroom floor Arthur wraps himself tightly around Eames anyway, stilling his trembling.

His body is hot and flushed. He smells of lemons and hot water and scrubbed skin.

'It's ok,' Arthur says, and the lie tastes coppery and dirty. Eames is wracked with terror, and Arthur can almost hear his bones rattling inside him as he shivers. 'It'll be ok.'

But it won't, will it? Because Arthur has suspected and fretted and eventually dismissed those vacant stares and confused frowns and quiet episodes over and over for months now, but this hard, solid evidence that's clinging to his shirt with all the strength of a toddler's squeezing grasp is irrefutable.

Eventually the steam clears as the shower turns cold. Eames falls silent and still, and he makes a swiftly aborted move to pull himself upright.

Arthur just clings tighter, and he rubs the soap suds into Eames' pink skin, and he closes his eyes against the harsh light glancing off the white tiles around them.

He wonders how many of these moments have occurred before, uninterrupted. How many times Eames has stood in front of this mirror, of any mirror, and lost himself in the steam of the shower for minutes, maybe hours at a time.

When he realises he'll probably never know, the shame of his own relief overwhelms him.

.

.

Arthur is dreaming.

The dream smells of burning tyres and the hot metal of guns; he can hear the delighted screams of children and the cawing of the gulls and the gritty, breathy wash of the tide.

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.

It is Yusuf, surprisingly, terribly, who says something first, long before Arthur says it even to himself.

It is months before, in Mombasa, which means that Eames is cheerful and Arthur is grumpy. The flight, which had involved two changes, had been terrible. When they finally reach the city limits all Arthur wants to do is sleep, but apparently if they don't go straight to Yusuf's, Eames will quite literally die of anticipation.

 _'Honestly, darling, you have no respect for my needs.'_

It is as if Eames has forgotten all about the four restive nights, and the bad job that preceded them, and the thousands of dollars lost paying out a dissatisfied extractor.

The fact that it is entirely possible he has forgotten, given his track record over the past six months, is pushed as far to the back of Arthur's mind as he can bury it. It's much simpler to chalk it up to Eames' natural selfishness, which to be fair there is plenty supply of.

They arrive just as Yusuf is closing up shop, and Eames sniffs out the alcohol before Yusuf can finish insisting he doesn't have anything in.

'Come on now, Yusuf,' Eames cheers in his best imitation of his friend, sounding brighter than he has done in days. 'A little winter warmer, yes?'

'It's Mombasa,' Yusuf grumbles. 'And it's June.'

He pulls three watermarked tumblers from a top shelf anyway.

They retreat to a back room, where the light is artificial and dusty, and the air is mercifully cool.

Here the bruising bags under Eames' eyes are more prominent, but his smile is warm and smug, and he keeps reaching up to trace lines into the damp nape of Arthur's neck, merely for the simple joy of being batted away.

His laugh is loud, the way it always is when they're in Africa, but it only makes his brief silences seem quieter. The air makes the drink taste almost stale, but there's lots of it, and they drink and talk and drink. The hours trickle past but the deceptive light bulb never dims, so when Arthur checks his watch and sees it's almost midnight he balks.

He's been awake for almost fifty hours.

'Sleep,' he announces to the room at large. 'Bed. Go. Now.'

It takes a few rocking motions in his chair before he's standing, and Eames is almost asleep on his feet when Arthur finally manages to pull him upright.

'Got the keys?' Arthur asks, as if he hadn't had a copy of his own cut years ago, just in case.

'What?' Eames blinks blearily. He stares at Arthur with absent eyes that have become too familiar. But Arthur reminds himself that it's been over a day since Eames has eaten anything, and he just finished off a bottle of bourbon by himself.

Of course he's confused.

'Eames,' Arthur says, his hands on his broad shoulders, squeezing. 'Keys.'

'Oh, darling,' Eames says abruptly, as if seeing him for the first time. There are trails of sweat lining his face, and his cheekbones are on display as they've never been before. When did that happen? 'Keys. Of course. Yes.'

Eames reaches deep into his pocket and fishes out a touristy Eiffel tower key chain that Arthur still can't quite forgive him for buying, a scratched silver key attached to one of its legs.

'Honestly, darling, you have so little faith in me.'

With that, Eames turns on his heel and hobbles towards the front room of the shop, bumping into the doorframe on his way out.

Arthur's about to follow suit when Yusuf grabs his arm. His fingers dig painfully into the soft inside of his elbow, and when Arthur turns his head Yusuf is leaning close.

'How long has he been like this?' he asks darkly.

Arthur wrenches his arm back as if burned, recoils to the doorway.

'He's fine. We've been working hard recently. We're taking a break.'

'Arthur,' Yusuf says, and the glittering light has gone from his eyes.

'Whatever you think, Yusuf, you're wrong.'

Arthur can feel himself bristling defensively under that scrutinising stare, but Yusuf only shrugs and nods, defeated.

'Alright,' he says quietly, as if to a feral animal. 'You know where I am.'

'Yes, I do,' Arthur retorts sharply, and leaves the room as swiftly as he is able, the drink sloshing in his otherwise empty stomach in sickening waves.

' _He's my friend, too, you know.'_

Yusuf's voice follows Arthur out of the room, and lingers in his ears as he reaches the main shop above.

Eames is standing near the door, swaying, swinging his keychain and whispering words that might be a song, but if they are Arthur doesn't know it. When Eames sees him he smiles gently, the rare tender smile that Arthur covets so fiercely.

'Let's go,' Arthur says firmly, moving quickly as he hears the tapping of Yusuf's footsteps behind him.

Eames, drunk and obedient, lets Arthur take his hand and pull him out into the starry night.

.

.

A month later, they fall together onto the tiles of the bathroom, wet and warm and shaking.

Arthur doesn't call Yusuf, but he thinks about it.

.

.

He thinks about it a lot.

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 **(fear)**

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.

Eames notices it a long time before anyone else, of course.

Eames notices years ahead of Arthur, when it happens in such brief flashes he can almost dismiss them as his own paranoid imagination.

Eames notices because he sees it happen to someone else first.

He sees with his own two, terrified eyes what happens to a forger who lingers too long in the skin of others.

Her name was Juliet. Her hair was the colour of Saharan sand, and just as soft. She had lots of freckles, and green eyes, and a wonky cupid's bow, and thin fingers that seemed too long for the rest of her hands, and perfectly shaped breasts, and a scar on her thigh from a knife wound that Eames stitched up himself.

She said it was a courtesy call, when she rang him up. She said she owed it to him. She was ten years his senior, but she'd always been his, even though she was one of the ones to slide the needle into his arm and whisper _just another go, you can do it, sweetheart_ , even as he begged her not to.

She said it started when the dreams returned.

Years of dreamless sleep, and suddenly they returned, like nightmares, even the good ones, too vivid and strong for her exhausted mind to sustain them. She'd wake up sweating and heaving, _and now_ , she said in a hoarse voice over the phone, _now sleep is in bursts of twenty minutes, no more, never more_.

She said it started when she spent an hour tearing her flat apart in search of her wedding ring, screaming and raging and destroying precious items in search of that platinum band – the one that belonged to the mark's husband she had forged the week before.

She said it started with long, vacant looks in the mirror, wondering if this was her real face, if perhaps she'd ever know her real face again.

He visits her in New Zealand, where she's settled down, hidden herself away between green mountains. Her bones protrude from her skin like animals inside her, trying to claw their way out. Her pretty green eyes have sunk into their bruised sockets and of her long thin fingers three are broken.

He pieces her back together, bit by bit, and he sleeps on the floor beside her bed for a fortnight.

He leaves because she insists, absent and muted, and because he has a job.

She's dead within a week.

Eames tells himself it's probably for the best. For her sake.

.

.

One day, only a few short years later, Eames catches himself staring too long in the mirror, worrying about the unfamiliar shape of his eyes. He has been forging for a long time, now, and he thinks about Juliet, and her timeline, and whether or not he can withstand the trials that consumed her.

He hasn't dreamt in years.

He hears rustling from the bedroom next door.

By the time Arthur creeps into the bathroom the shower is on and the air is full of the smell of soapy hotel shampoo. He steps boldly in, nudging his way into the hot spray.

Eames smiles into the taste of his skin, and forgets to worry.

.

.

'What can we do?' Ariadne asks, taking a large bite out of her ice cream cone. There are drips of chocolate on her lips, and the sun is bleaching everything around them.

They're in Rome.

It's full of tourists baking in the July heat, and Ariadne is playing the part of one well, what with her sun dress and her sunglasses and her horribly expensive Italian gelato. Arthur is wearing a suit, because it's the only armour he has left. The shadows under his eyes are noticeable now, and there's a weight stronger than gravity that feels a lot like grief anchoring him.

It's the first time he's left the apartment in over a week.

'We need to find someone who knows more about forgery,' Arthur replies heavily.

It's been about an hour since he gave up saying _I_ and accepted Ariadne's firm correction of _we._ Why would she have flown out to them if not to see it through?

Arthur would like to cling to the pride that has always kept him from outright asking for help, particularly from people he has had a hand in training, but he won't go so far as to refuse help when it's offered freely.

Not now. Not with this.

'Where is Eames?' Ariadne had asked upon arrival, and Arthur's mind had turned to the apartment he'd booked in advance, the large bag full of ugly little tubs of benzodiazepines, Eames' limp form tucked under the covers as he had crept out into the welcoming sunshine.

'Sleeping,' he had replied stiffly.

'Have you got anyone in mind?' Ariadne asks now.

It's been several years since she joined their world, but Arthur wouldn't be surprised if Eames is the only forger she knows. They've taken care of her, in their own way.

'There's a few,' Arthur says uncomfortably.

In fact, Arthur's fairly certain he knows all or at least most of the active forgers in dreamshare, by reputation at least if not personally.

It's been a long time since he worked with a forger who wasn't Eames, though.

'Has this ever happened before?'

Cobb wanted her for her imagination from the beginning, but Arthur has always preferred her practicality. He's almost certain it's what saved Cobb, deep in the layers of Fischer's mind, years ago.

'Pretty much all of the best forgers came out of the military programmes,' Arthur says delicately. 'The best I've known, at least. There's someone that might be able to help us, but she'll be hard to find.'

Ariadne perks up at the information, the hand holding her ice cream cone dropping to the table.

'Including Eames?' she asks.

Arthur could lie. Arthur could say he doesn't know, or he could give a vague non-answer, or he could…

'Yes. Eames was military,' he replies.

'Is that how you met?'

Digging too far into Cobb's subconscious did nothing for her sense of boundaries.

'No. We never met in the military.'

At that, Arthur waves over a young waitress and orders two espressos, and thankfully it's enough of a hint for Ariadne to not ask the most obvious next question.

The phantom pull of dogtags itch the back of his neck, and he tugs lightly at his collar.

'Where do we start looking?' Ariadne asks instead.

Arthur bites the inside of his lip, smiles tightly at the waitress as she brings their coffees, and checks his watch.

'London,' he says.

The espresso is rich and hot, and the cup burns his lips, and the city glows with sunshine. Ariadne just nods.

In the apartment less than half a mile away, Eames opens his eyes.

.

.

The first time Dominick Cobb is contracted by the army, when he spends most of his time watching Mallorie Miles with a longing he can't articulate, he is approached by Major Reece Doyle.

The second time, when he has loved, lost and mourned that same woman and is now a single father, he is approached by Lieutenant Colonel Reece Doyle.

Reece is not an old friend, but he is a long standing source of trustworthy information. He was also the only military face to stand up for his good name in the wake of Mallorie's death.

Reece is impressed by Dom's skill, by Dom's passion, by Dom's determination.

He is also impressed by Dom's professionalism, and it's for this reason that when Dom calls to ask for some sensitive information, he is happy to push the envelope a little further than he might otherwise go to get it for him.

(And by pushing the envelope, that might even mean breaking a moral code or two in the name of justice.)

When the package arrives, Dom calls Arthur.

.

.

'How do you do it?' Ariadne had asked once. The first job, maybe the hardest job.

She had bought right into Eames' sly grin, and between blinks she was standing suddenly in front of Arthur. Well, not Arthur, but the body of Arthur, everything down to the neatly rolled up sleeves and dark blue tie he'd been sporting topside before Eames took her under.

'It's a matter of balance,' Arthur-but-not-Arthur says, cocking his head to a slight left and screwing his lips as he thinks.

Ariadne smiles, and a squeal of laughter bubbles out of her.

'That's perfect,' she grins.

'Not quite,' Eames replies, reclaiming his own face, rubbing at the golden stubble on his chin.

'How do you do it?' she asks again.

'It's about choosing what you remember and what you forget. You don't just _pretend._ You become.'

Despite his light grin, the gravity in his voice seems to drop weights in her gut. Ariadne tries to imagine what it would be like to knowingly choose to forget, when there was even the slightest chance she might never remember.

She doesn't ask again.

.

.

Eames is lying on his back when they enter the bedroom, sweaty with Italian sunshine and stomachs heavy with ice cream and coffee.

Arthur is so busy wrestling with his conscience over even letting Ariadne see Eames sleep, so vulnerable and exposed, that it takes him several moments to realise those glassy grey eyes are open and staring at him.

'Oh god,' he says, and Eames flinches at the loud voice. 'Jesus,' Arthur says more quietly, resting one knee on the bed, so the mattress sinks a little beneath his wary weight.

He presses a hand lightly on Eames' chest. It rises and falls calmly, but beneath Arthur's palm his heart is a caged hummingbird.

'I'm sorry,' Arthur says. 'Eames?'

Eames' eyes rove his face hungrily, but the recognition is faint and flickering, and when a frown starts to crease his brow like damp paper Arthur feels a flare of panic red and bright in his chest, tightening his windpipe.

'Eames, no, Eames, look at me, look at me,' he demands, and he holds his face tight in clammy hands. There's sweat on their top lips, almost touching as Arthur leans close until they share breaths. 'Eames?'

He can hear Ariadne's muffled footsteps on the carpet, but he's locked in a fight for Eames' attention and he just has to hope she won't do anything.

'Please, Eames, wake up,' he whispers this time before sitting up a little.

The shadow of Ariadne appears on Eames' other side.

She reaches cautiously, until her small fingers slip into his big hand.

'Hello, Eames,' she says quietly.

Eames blinks, licks his lips. His eyes shift dangerously between their faces until he starts to move, slow and creaking, like an old lion.

Arthur moves back to sit near the foot of the bed.

'Ariadne. Didn't realise we were due a visit so soon.'

Eames' voice is cracked with sleep, but it sends a burning flash of hurt through Arthur's lungs to hear him find Ariadne's name so smoothly. He's brushing his hand over Arthur's knee with lazy knuckles as if only half aware of his presence.

'Thought it would be fun,' Ariadne says with a smile. If she's offended when Eames hastily extracts his hand from hers, she's sensible enough not to show it.

'Arthur been showing you the sights?' he asks with a slow familiar leer, and he winks at Arthur, but Arthur can't muster more than a shrug. 'Bet he hasn't shown you the best of them.'

'Underground poker joints are not the best sights in Rome, Mister Eames,' Arthur sighs, and a smile begins to pull in his cheeks.

For the first time in three days Eames looks at him with a glint of mischievous recognition in his eyes.

His smile, however tentative, is radiant.

'Oh darling,' he grins, shaking his head. 'What on earth would you know about it?'

.

.

 **(anger)**

.

.

The first time they meet is in Rome, through an extractor called Greta who is killed on a botched job in Cairo eleven months later.

Eames has fewer tattoos, a split lip and a shaved head.

Arthur is going through his first Tom Ford phase, has longer hair than he's ever had before and he doesn't smile the entire time, no matter Eames' best efforts.

They don't have sex until in Krakow job.

.

.

(But that's only because Arthur refuses to count the bathroom blowjobs in Ljubljana.)

.

.

(Or the handjobs in Brazil.)

.

.

Yes.

Arthur, darling, it's Eames. From the Leoni Job.

Yes.

Fancy a trip to Sao Paolo?

What's the job?

Who said there was a job?

Eames. You can't be serious.

I happen to love South America, and you said you'd never been. I already booked you a ticket. Beijing, right?

How did you –

Ah ah ah, I have trade secrets to keep, sweetheart. I'll text you the details. See you in a few days.

Eames? Are you – ah, you – you bastard.

.

.

There are other concerns, of course.

Arthur doesn't know how long or how often Eames has tempered this growing storm with his own brands of self-medication, but he does know that he is now regularly supplying a part time addict with all manner of medications.

.

.

If Eames ever thinks about slipping a few too many down with his brew some days, he never acts on the urge.

Arthur tells himself he won't try to stop Eames, if it's what he really wants.

.

.

(Arthur is lying to himself.)

.

.

 **(rage)**

.

.

It happens like this:

Arthur wrestles a loaded gun from a hysterical Eames.

Eames punches Arthur hard in the mouth.

Arthur pistol whips Eames so hard he clatters backwards over the coffee table.

Eames laughs, and then Eames cries.

Arthur dismantles the gun and straddles Eames' heaving torso where he lies listless on the floor of the New York apartment they've been holed up in for a fortnight.

Eames calms down. He pulls Arthur forwards to lock him in a stiff embrace. He whispers in his ear, vulnerable and defeated.

.

.

( _Private Faulker_ , he whispers, _Frederick. Jonathan.)_

.

.

They fly to Rome.

(Ariadne joins them.)

.

.

Arthur makes the mistake of thinking the name is Frederick Jonathan Faulker.

In actual fact, the names are Frederick James Faulker and Jonathan Blake Faulker.

There is a photo of them standing side by side, dated June 2000. They are almost completely identical.

Jonathan is bulkier.

Frederick's hair is longer.

Still, looking at them, Arthur cannot tell which one is Eames.

Eames has worn Jonathan's sullen stare and Frederick's light half-smile more times than Arthur can count.

.

.

 **(terror)**

.

.

Eames is born on a Tuesday.

He is twenty-four years old, with sandy brown hair and grey eyes and a tattoo on the back of his left shoulder.

He is three months recovered from a bullet that punctured his lung after going clean through a rib that might easily have splintered its way into his heart.

He is conceived on a Sunday, a heated discussion at half past three in the morning between a young man and an older woman.

Two days later he is born. Passport, money, booked onto a flight due to take off from Heathrow to Istanbul in less than four hours.

The older woman's name is Juliet.

It doesn't matter who the younger man is, because on Tuesday he is reborn as Eames.

Eames carries few personal possessions on his flight to Istanbul.

A battered copy of _One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest_ , a racy pack of pin up girl cards, a folded postcard from Vienna, and a set of dogtags that don't match.

It will be another three years before he ever returns to England.

From Istanbul he flies to Prague. From Prague to Melbourne. Then to Kuala Lumpur, then to Honolulu, then to Miami. From Miami he flies to Las Vegas, where he stays for three weeks.

By the time he leaves Vegas he is six months recovered from a bullet through his lung, and he knows everything there is to know about Eames.

Eames is a cautiously quiet people-watcher who makes keen observations, but also reckless decisions when the mood takes him. Eames is a gambler, a con man and a thief.

Eames is intelligent but not a genius. Eames is brave but not actively courageous. Eames is mistrustful on principle, but loyal when it counts.

Eames does not enjoy killing, but he is not above a little pre-emptive violence.

Eames drinks little and often.

Eames does not dream without a PASIV.

Eames needs regular access to a PASIV or he will probably die.

.

.

After his revelatory tattoo breakdown in the bathroom Eames sleeps for eleven hours. When he wakes up he has no recollection of the incident, and is unbothered by the tattoos littering his torso.

Arthur, caught between crying and punching Eames in the face, retreats to his laptop to research.

Three days later Eames lectures Arthur for sixteen and a half minutes on how selfish it is of him to buy so much yoghurt when Arthur knows Eames is lactose intolerant.

When Arthur patiently informs Eames that he is not actually lactose intolerant, there is a brief moment in which Arthur thinks Eames might actually attempt to strangle him.

The descent comes alarmingly fast after that. It comes in bursts and waves, with moments in between suspended like light on water, shimmering and precious and always slipping away too soon.

.

.

 _Oh god, what's happening? I don't understand. Fuck. Fuck it. Arthur? I don't – please. What's going on? Why are you crying? Is that – ? Fuck. Oh my god, Arthur I am – I am so sorry. I'm so sorry. Fuck. I don't know what's happening to me._

.

.

Arthur knows this last utterance is a lie. Eames knows far more than he's telling, and Arthur is just waiting for him to say it.

In fact, Arthur already knows what he's going to say.

There's a reason forgers charge such obscene prices.

.

.

(It's a short career.)

.

.

 _Darling?_

Eames?

 _I've got something to tell you._

Ok.

 _My name wasn't always Eames._

I know.

 _You know?_

I don't know what your real name was. I couldn't find it.

 _You looked? Of course you did._

Are you going to tell me your name?

 _Maybe soon. It's complicated._

.

.

In 1998 Jonathan and Frederick Faulker sign up to the army together.

Twenty year old identical twins, it takes less than three weeks for dreamshare special ops to snatch them up.

Four years later, Jonathan puts a bullet in Frederick's chest.

Then he puts another in his own skull.

.

.

Ariadne holds Eames' hand.

He's docile and she's frightened.

With her free hand she turns the pages of the book in her lap as she reads aloud, an old copy of _One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest_.

She had protested when Arthur handed it to her, dismissing it as poor taste, but he had sworn it was the only book Eames would be guaranteed to listen to.

He was right, of course.

She's on Chapter Seven. Eames has had his eyes closed where he sits beside her on the sofa for the past three chapters, but Ariadne knows he isn't sleeping.

Eames listens. Ariadne reads. She stumbles over a particular accent she has chosen for McMurphy, but keeps going because it managed to draw a small smile from her captive audience some time during Chapter Four.

They wait for Arthur's return.

.

.

They do not expect him to come with Dominick Cobb in tow, but when he does they are grateful all the same, both of them.

.

.

Arthur joins the military when he is eighteen years old. He leaves when he is twenty-three, after a tour in Afghanistan and intensive dreamshare training.

Arthur leaves the military on the twenty-third of April 2005 when his best friend, Lieutenant Grahame Jenson, becomes the seventh dreamer to get snapped up by the higher ups and spat out in pieces a few months later.

The last thing Grahame ever says to Arthur is in writing – a surreptitious miracle note that appears in his footlocker, the messenger of which Arthur has never uncovered.

Get out now, it says in the familiar, unsigned scrawl.

Three days later, Lieutenant Grahame Jenson is removed to a psychiatric unit from which nobody ever returns, where he is promptly erased from existence.

The next day, Lieutenant Arthur Calkley vanishes.

.

.

 **(hope)**

.

.

Frederick Faulker is in an induced coma for a week after being shot in the chest by his brother.

When he wakes up he smiles, bleary and kind, at the nurse fiddling with his IV.

It is another three and a half weeks before he speaks a word.

When he does, it is to ask for Juliet.

A month after that, Frederick Faulker vanishes into thin air.

So does Juliet Wilcox.

.

.

 _What? Hello?_

Arthur?

 _Cobb._

I've found something.

 _What?_

It's US military, and I know Eames was UK but I think it will help. It sounds like a similar case –

 _What are you talking about? I never –_

Ariadne called me. I thought you would, but when you didn't – I'm sorry. But I do think I can help you.

 _Cobb, Jesus, I just –_

Arthur, when Mal died you picked up and came with me without questioning me, or even – anything. You helped me when I was – beyond help. Let me help you.

 _I can't…Cobb, I don't know._

Just come. Bring Eames if you want. I can help you. Arthur?

 _Ok. Ok. I'll come. But I'm not bringing Eames._

.

.

Arthur likes to think he could've found the necessary help himself, but the truth is Eames offers it all to him on a silver platter.

In a stretch of time that now seems like paradise, six long lazy days of lucid, loving contentment, Eames writes down a list for Arthur to find.

He writes it on a post-it note, cryptic and shy, sticks it to the inside back page of Arthur's current notebook.

 _Alice Moraity_ is fourth on the list, before _Rome_ and after _Juliet Wilcox_.

'Who is she?' Arthur asks when he finds it.

Eames, sprawled on the bed in a tangle of sticky sheets with a wide, self-satisfied grin on his smug face, freezes momentarily, then rubs a hand once over his face to wipe away his smirk, replacing it with a light frown.

'She was one of the officers running the special ops on the dreamshare project,' he says darkly. 'Not the higher higher ups, but she ran a lot of the sessions. She was the one under with me the first time I ever forged.'

A cloud has slipped into the room, thundery and sad, at the mention of Alice Moraity, pulling Eames' expression down. Arthur tosses the book onto the sideboard and clambers back onto the bed, waiting until he can no longer tell Eames' limbs from his own and their breaths are heavy, slow, in sync, before continuing.

'Is she still there?'

For a moment the thick air of the room swallows his words.

'Doubtful,' Eames says with a sigh, burying his face into the crown of Arthur's head.

.

.

It doesn't take long.

Arthur is the best, after all, and with Ariadne's proffered help he doesn't even have to wait until Eames is sleeping.

To his utmost surprise, when he suggests Eames stay behind while they visit Moraity, Eames agrees.

.

.

Perhaps it is to his utmost _fear._ He doesn't tell Eames that, though, nor Ariadne.

.

.

Alice Moraity is a short woman, probably close to her fifties, with prominent collar bones that match her cheekbones. Her dark hair falls in waves around her face, softening her severe features.

She greets them with a brisk handshake each.

'Thank you, Ms. Moraity,' Arthur says candidly as they take their seats in a private booth of a swanky restaurant that Ariadne feels a little too underdressed for, judging by the figure hugging, glossy cocktail dress Moraity is sporting.

'It's not for you,' Moraity corrects Arthur, pouring three generous glasses of the red wine already waiting for them and browsing the menu as if she has all the time in the world.

She's not English, as Ariadne had assumed she would be, but Welsh. Not even her gentle accent can thaw the ice in her tone, though.

Arthur takes a menu and Ariadne follows suit, but the words are a blur before her eyes. She's almost certain she's never felt less hungry in her life.

'I know,' Arthur replies coolly.

'Where is he?' the woman asks, still perusing the menu with an expression of deep interest.

'Safe,' Arthur promises.

'Has he disappeared completely?'

Her dismissive question, the tone of which confirms all of Arthur's suspicions, tugs so sharply in his gut that he almost chokes on his wine. Beside him, Ariadne makes a small noise of startled anger. He reaches over to place a placating hand on her leg.

Moraity merely narrows her eyes. When she finally she looks up from her menu it's to scrutinise Arthur carefully.

'No,' he replies calmly. 'He's lucid sometimes.'

'How often?' Moraity sounds disbelieving, and the anxiety lines that break through her tidy makeup give Arthur another wrench in his insides.

'At least once a day, usually. Sometimes for hours at a time.'

It's supposed to remove the anxiety lines on her face, so that in turn Arthur can feel a little safer, a little more hopeful.

Moraity simply returns her gaze to her menu.

Ariadne slips her fingers gently into Arthur's palm. He allows them to rest there, soft and useless.

'You're a forger?' Ariadne asks tentatively, and Moraity looks up sharply, glances towards the main floor of the restaurant as if considering leaving.

'No,' she snaps. Her fingers are bone white, clutching her menu. 'But I've known many.'

'Known,' Arthur repeats coldly. His hand twitches over Ariadne's, and he feels her curious eyes turn to him.

'Trained,' Moraity acknowledges with a tiny tilt of her head.

Arthur cannot keep the dark scowl from flickering over his face, though he knows he can't afford to pick fights.

His self control is slipping, though, along with his patience and his fear.

'That's one word for it,' he says in a low voice.

'I don't understand,' Ariadne says, shaking her head. Her menu lies forgotten on the table. 'How can you help –'

'She _trained_ Eames,' Arthur explains with a faint sneer that makes Ariadne shrink in her seat.

Moraity, on the other hand, meets Arthur's gaze with defiant indifference.

'I did,' she says. 'And I'll have less of your attitude, boy. I did my best for Frederick. I wasn't the one handing out orders.'

At the name, Ariadne's lips part in a breath of delicate surprise, and Arthur looks at her sharply, which is nothing new but she blushes at Moraity's equally intrusive stare. So does Arthur, which is frightening and bizarre, but he schools his expression and tightens his fists.

'How well do you know your comrade, Miss…'

'Ariadne,' she supplies, raising her chin high and hoping that if she ignores her blushing so will the others at the table.

'Ariadne,' the older woman says. It comes out as more of an accusation than her name. 'If Frederick hasn't seen fit to share even his name with you, why should I presume to share details of his past with you?'

Moraity's eyes are a hot shade of yellow in the low light of the booth, and they glitter when they turn to Arthur, who stares back at her unflinching.

'Why should I trust you?' Moraity demands, and Arthur feels relief flood his chest like new oxygen. If she doesn't get up and leave in the next five seconds, he knows she'll stay, and if she stays, she'll help.

He cocks his head at the question, as if considering, though he knows the only possible answer, and when he gives it he makes sure to sound as careless and indifferent as he has ever sounded before.

'Because he does.'

A tight smile appears on Moraity's face.

'He's misplaced his trust before,' she warns sadly.

'In you?' Arthur asks.

Moraity's eyes are abruptly dark as the fire in them dims, as changeable as the creatures she bred in the hidden corners of dreamshare. She glances towards Ariadne, who is watching their exchange with such rapture she might well be holding her breath.

'Among others,' Moraity replies quietly.

She looks at her menu again, and in her momentary distraction Arthur throws Ariadne a small, reassuring smile.

.

.

 _You're Frederick_ , Arthur says, hoarse and cracking, later.

 _You're Frederick Faulker. Alice Moraity called you Frederick. Do you understand?_ Arthur says, wet and gasping.

Eames frowns at him, speculative, and remembers what it means to be Frederick.

Then he remembers what it means to be Jonathan, and forgets to listen to the warm, welcome mouth whispering in his ear.

 _You're Frederick_ , Arthur says, but what does Arthur know?

He wasn't there. He didn't see.

He doesn't know what it means to give in to the identity of another, to fill your head with the memories of another, so similar and so different to your own in equal measure, until they are all one.

.

.

To train a forger you need three things:

 _Time._ Enough time topside to be leisurely going under, an abundance of time; level after level of it, all the time you can steal.

 _Talent._ The raw kind, the kind that lingers inside someone, unleashes itself if prodded at the right angle with the right stick.

 _Leverage._ Strong, heavy, broad stuff, the sort of leverage that keeps their veins open, because nobody lets you into their heads over and over until they're weeping blood without something hanging over them.

.

.

(Alice Moraity struck gold, of course.)

(Alice Moraity had the time, the talent, and an abundance of leverage. She had four years with two prodigies. She had their fierce sibling affection.)

.

.

(So you see, it was inevitable.)

.

.

There's a wide balcony, a bottle of champagne and a large bar of chocolate. There's also a thick blanket that they lay on, sprawled limbs, skin on skin, fingertips tracing tattoos and threading through hair, too hot for kisses in the sunny blaze.

Eames' face is soft, lips kiss bruised and skin flushed where it's stretched over his cheekbones. His palm is warm on Arthur's abdomen, heavy and thrumming.

'Tell me how it happened,' Arthur says, a command so tender it's a caress through the air.

Beneath them, Rome ripples.

Eames' hand presses into Arthur's muscles, a delicate warning - though a warning of what Arthur has several guesses.

His breath is hot as he turns his head. His eyes are bright and sharp and wonderfully present.

'Eames,' Arthur says, and his hands find their way to Eames' face and throat, as if he hopes to tug the confession from the forger's mouth, the rough pad of his thumb pressing against his plush lower lip.

'Tell me,' Arthur whispers into the scant damp air between their mouths, shifting so they're face to face, boxer clad and sun kissed.

'We were in the programme for four years,' Eames replies after several long arduous breaths that come like the tide. 'Jon – Jonathan was more resistant. He fought them at every turn, questioned their every decision.'

He chooses his words carefully. Seems to be selecting and weighing each one in turn.

Arthur can't help but feel he recognises something of Jonathan in Eames, and feels something safe tentatively settle on his sternum.

'Freddie, though,' Eames continues, interrupting Arthur's deliberation. 'He just let himself get swept along.'

Arthur blinks, tries to process what he just heard.

Twins, yes? But then –

'Eames,' Arthur says, splutters his name like a foreign curse, heavy on his tongue. 'But which one are you?'

Eames' brow creases in confusion. His lips are damp, pressed outwards in a pout of disdain for Arthur's bewildering question.

'What do you mean?' he asks, dangerous and hoarse.

'Eames,' Arthur says again, as if reinforcing a name that has not yet earned a decade and a half of history will help clarify the mystery. 'Are you Jonathan or are you Frederick?'

Eames' scowl only deepens.

'What a ridiculous question, darling,' he scoffs, sounding painfully fond all of a sudden.

The brightness in those spidery grey eyes suddenly seems fevered, glassy, a distant, muted shade of a sea tormented by storm that Arthur had been certain he'd weathered. Has he only forgotten how to recognise clarity, fogged over by his own blinding love?

A poison seeps through the fizzy taste of the champagne that had burst on his tongue.

Everything feels spoiled. All the years leading to these tantalising moments of devastating realisation.

'And why is that ridiculous?' he asks tenderly, naturally, as if his insides aren't writhing.

Eames is gentle, cradling the empty space above Arthur's heart, which like the rest of him has long belonged to Eames.

'Why on earth would I just be one of them?' Eames teases, like Arthur is silly and like Arthur is a child, his fingertips ghosts and his smile unreal, brilliant, terrible.

Something inside Arthur shatters irreparably.

It feels a lot like his ribcage.

.

.

This is what happened:

Jonathan Faulker, who is vivacious and loved, vapid and immutable, wrestles against his own subconscious. It is a manhunt through his mind, three hours topside, an exhaustive scourge.

He takes a bullet in his left leg, and for six hours he covers it up, wrapped in an illusion of a thirteen year old girl with red hair and brown eyes, dark jeans damp at the hems and trainers with mud on their laces.

Jonathan sweats and bleeds, but the girl, Rosie-Mae, who was his first kiss, is quiet and calm and her cool dark eyes are untroubled.

The dream is a city, Manchester to be exact, a replica so precise that Jonathan trembles as he sweats and bleeds and slowly starts to recede into the furthest depths of his thoughts. He kicks his feet into the puddles at a bus stop, where three other projections also wait.

Rosie-Mae, who is thirteen and red haired and shy, feels a strange deep ache in her left calf muscle. She rubs it with sharp fingers.

.

.

It takes Arthur a while to understand, too.

.

.

The point is this:

Jonathan Faulker never kissed Rosie-Mae Barrie.

This is a memory that Frederick Faulker treasures, the same way he treasures all his memories that precede the military: jealously and distantly.

.

.

In the dream of Manchester which is exact and profound, the agents find Jonathan with hours still left on the clock, and though with extensively strong persuasion they get him to drop the forge, he can't seem to find his way back to his own true face.

When the clock runs out, when he is wrenched from the broken bones of his godfather and into the racing pulse of his own body, Jonathan gasps, searches wildly, reaches blindly, but Frederick is in another room, on his own timer. He might be screaming. If he is, Jonathan won't hear it from here.

Jonathan wants to ask his twin about Rosie-Mae. He wants to know why he remembers the smell of her apple shampoo and the taste of her raspberry lip gloss and the feel of her home knitted scarf tickling his chin.

.

.

 **(despair)**

.

.

For years, Arthur assumes the poker chip means something.

For years Arthur assumes Eames not only knows what a totem is, but has one himself.

.

.

They are sprawled naked across a queen-sized bed, dripping with sweat and sunshine that pours in through the bay windows, ankles hooked around each other.

Eames is leveraging his entire weight into Arthur's left ankle and it's not until Arthur spots Eames' clothes lying far from the bed near the door that a flare of suspicion rattles him.

'Eames,' Arthur says sharply, the lines of his muscles freezing over his bones. 'What are you doing?'

There is a grunt, and then there is a heavy keening from them both as Eames hoists himself back up onto the plain of the bed.

' _Darling,'_ Eames says, light and teasing, stretching out the a even longer with a lion's wide grin. 'Didn't take you for a gambling man.'

Arthur pauses for a moment so small the fear that pulses to his extremities chills his veins impossibly fast. But it does, and after the moment has passed he lunges in three directions at once – for Eames' leg, for Eames' clenched fist, and for the gun beneath the bedside cabinet.

He reaches the fist first, and Eames is laughing like it's a joke as Arthur grapples furiously at his hands and face.

'Give it to me – Eames – fuck – Eames – _now_ \- this isn't funny – _Eames_ – give it to me now!'

Beneath the fast fading laughter, Eames' face is bemused, all crooked teeth and glassy eyes.

'Ow – Arthur – what – ow – _ow!'_

Arthur peels back his fingers, and blood is dripping down Eames' thumb by the time the little red die is safely again in the right hands.

The torso clamped between Arthur's thighs is damp and hot, and once they're empty Eames' hands find themselves pressing into the scratch marks littering those thin hips.

The swift jabbing punch to the face that follows is somewhat unexpected, and Eames' gasp is followed by a whine of self pity.

'Darling, I said a _bit_ rough, not –'

'That was _not_ funny, Eames,' Arthur says, barely containing his shout and clenching the red die between his forefinger and thumb to hover it an inch above Eames' now slightly bloody nose.

Eames, for his part, is utterly bewildered, particularly when the tender hand he tries to place on Arthur's lower abdomen is slapped with a stinging crack.

'Arthur, what –'

'It's my _totem,_ obviously, you complete asshole. Why were you going through my pockets?'

To this last, Eames snickers, his voice pale and teasing and ever so slightly afraid.

'I've never heard such a daft question leave your pretty lips, Arthur.'

His hands are warm and sticky on Arthur's waist, and his eyes are on Arthur's trembling hands as if they might wrap around his throat.

'As to the former,' he continues in the same delicate voice, 'there's nothing _obvious_ about it, dear.'

'What are you talking about?' Arthur splutters. 'It's my _totem,_ Eames.'

'Well, saying it louder isn't going to help, Arthur,' Eames replies indignantly.

His cheeks are pink, and there's a ribbon of blood drying in a wonky smear over his top lip. There's an unconscious beauty about this man, Arthur thinks. But only when he forgets to pose, which is unfortunately rare.

'Eames,' Arthur grits his teeth with little patience, 'my totem. Like your poker chip.'

Eames' eyes steel, and his fingers dig into Arthur's skin, his nails biting the flesh.

'Like my…what does my poker chip have to do with anything?'

His confusion makes Arthur want to check his die properly, instead of just gripping it until the dots imprint on his palm.

'But it's your tot…your reality check,' Arthur corrects.

Perhaps it's only the term that's unfamiliar.

'My _reality_ check?' Eames' tongue clicks against the roof of his mouth.

Apparently not.

'It tells you if you're dreaming or not,' Arthur replies, shifting his weight higher up Eames' torso. Eames' eyes flicker down his naked form, and he licks his lips slowly, visibly considering changing the course of their conversation.

Arthur shakes his head, but he doesn't quite lean back when Eames cranes his head forwards to lick a line of sweat up his sternum.

'Arthur,' Eames murmurs against his damp skin, leaving wet kisses higher and higher until he's sitting up, nose buried in his throat. 'Darling, I'm a forger. All I would ever need is a reflective surface. Which I don't.'

Arthur pants quietly, one palm against Eames' cheek as his fingers press gently over his forehead and eyes, tapping him away reluctantly.

'But,' he breathes slowly. 'You're always carrying your poker chip. I've seen you.'

He can feel Eames' smile, and he blushes. He's tried not to make his habit of watching Eames noticeable, but damnit the man sees everything.

'For Christ's sake,' Eames laughs. 'Can't a man have a keepsake to fiddle with?'

The lines of their bodies are pressed together, and Arthur can feel the huffing breath in Eames' lungs against his own chest.

He doesn't know how long they've spent dampening these sheets, but the hours have been stolen. The hours they spend together have always been stolen.

'You mean,' Arthur asks quietly in the breath they share, 'it's just a – a thing?'

Eames' face is unreadable, sombre yet amused. He might be laughing at Arthur, or he might not.

'Well if you're going to blunt about it, yes.' His voice is strangled, as if offended, but he teases his lips against Arthur's chin as he says it. 'I made it the first time I went to Vegas. My first attempt at forging chips. That one was a bit wonky, so I just kept it.'

His eyes flit to his clothes on the floor behind Arthur. When they return to Arthur's face he shrugs, as open as Arthur thinks he's probably capable of ever being.

'Totem,' Eames says with a grin, rolling the word over his tongue, testing its weight and finding it to his liking. 'Clever idea, though,' he sighs, and his arms find their way around Arthur's waist until his ribs protest but his mouth doesn't. 'Whose idea was it?'

'Mal's,' Arthur replies, gasping for air, one hand buried in sandy, sticky hair and the other still clenched around his totem, his knuckles pressing between Eames' shoulder blades.

'Ah, of course.' He doesn't sound surprised. For the first time, something guilty flashes over his flushed face. 'Guess I sort of ruined it, then. Didn't I?' He presses another kiss to the hollow of Arthur's throat. 'Sorry, love.'

In the silent space that follows, Arthur pulls back his head, hungry eyes roving that stubbled, shining face. Eames' lips are swollen, his hair rumpled, He's staring at Arthur with sharp, clear eyes.

Arthur kisses him hard, bruising and biting, and Eames responds with a wet gasp of surprise and a hard tilt of his hips.

His skin is warm, his kisses warmer, and Arthur thinks that he might just be in love with this damnable, totem-less forger.

(It will be another twenty-two months before he admits it, all the same.)

.

.

Well, hello there. And who might you be?

 _Arthur. Point man. You're Eames._

Oh, aren't you good? What gave it away?

 _We were expecting you over an hour ago, Mr Eames._

Sorry. Lost track of time. I do love Italy, don't you?

 _We were discussing our options._

Right, well I'm here now. Oh, and I almost forgot. My notes on the mark's brother, his aunt, and, my personal favourite, the ever so delicious cousin Achille.

 _Your notes? When did you make these?_

Well, while I was tailing them, sweetheart. Didn't Greta tell you? Well, here I am now. I'll try to be on time tomorrow. Though I make no promises. Anything else?

 _No. Just. Thank you._

You are most welcome, darling.

 _Please, don't._

.

.

Eames sleeps. He is restive. He dreams.

When he dreams, it is vivid and unnatural, a flickering series of overexposed photographs that he doesn't remember taking.

Faces he has known, faces he has forged, faces he has made. They splinter like broken masks.

A gust of wind howls its agony along a pink, shelled coast, glittering. Two little boys with hair the colour of their sand dusted legs, they chase the waves. A woman watches.

Beyond, a figure, trembling as the shore slowly eats him up.

The markets of Mombasa. The Vegas Bellagio. London Bridge (is burning down, burning down).

A face – his face, his face? – Brighton pier sparkling, red lollipops, a twinkling carousel, the horses alive and kicking.

Eames wakes up, sweating, gasping, retching, loose and languid, hard and aching.

He is not himself.

.

.

Arthur dreams of a yellow swing set.

Arthur can feel the rush of air over his crinkled face, feel the soles of his feet scuffing the floor, back and forth and back and forth, higher, faster.

Arthur hears his mother's laughter.

Arthur wakes up.

Arthur wonders if he is going mad, too.

.

.

Sometimes they wake together, and their eyes find each other despite night's thick, blinding blanket, and they share something silent and impossible. As if they have surpassed the PASIV.

As if they have transcended the meagre state of false unconsciousness and can share without.

As if they can dream in tandem, unhindered by chemicals that clog their arteries and fog their brains.

Perhaps they can.

Perhaps they have only ever been dreaming.

(Arthur hopes they are. He hopes they will wake up together, as Arthur and Eames, and that they will be whole.)

.

.

 **(bright spot, dear heart)**

.

.

The plan is more the accumulation of time and terror and little tidbits, compounded in a drastic moment of screeching shards in which Eames gets his hands around Dom's throat and doesn't stop squeezing until Arthur and Yusuf have their own hands around his. He roars like a wounded bull and screams like a child, kicks his legs in flurry and doesn't stop for over half an hour.

He passes out mid bellow, hands grasping for Arthur's chest, cracks his head on the floor and the knuckles of his right hand are broken, crushed beneath his body.

'Eames?' Arthur whispers, damp and hoarse. He drops to his knees, rolls Eames over onto his back. His broken hand is already starting to swell, and there's a red mark blossoming to a bruise on one eyebrow. 'Eames, wake up,' Arthur says, hands on his chest.

'Eames, come on boy,' Yusuf joins in, kneeling on Eames' other side and pressing his fingers over his pulse. 'Wake up Eames. It's ok,you're ok lad.'

Eames' face is slack and starved. Arthur cradles his mangled, swollen hand in both of his own while Yusuf checks Eames over more thoroughly.

'Fever,' Yusuf mutters under his breath, and there is the shifting of footsteps close by.

'His brain's going into overdrive.'

Dom's voice is rough, left gasping by Eames' strangulation and soothed with water since, but it makes Arthur no more sympathetic to his assumption.

'You don't know that,' he snaps viciously, and flinches when Dom puts a hand on his shoulder as he crouches beside them.

'Arthur,' Dom whispers, in a tone so sickeningly sympathetic it makes Arthur want to squeeze flesh, too.

Yusuf's hands are gentle and swift, strong when they help Arthur manhandle Eames up into a deckchair.

Dom hovers authoritatively, flutters helplessly.

Ariadne's absence is only noted when it's filled, her perfume strong and her hands cool around two wet cloths, one of which she hands to Arthur and the other she spreads over Eames' forehead, dabbing at his swollen eyebrow. Arthur breathes in the scent wafting from her hair and wraps the second wet cloth, almost icy as it trickles over his fingers, around Eames' knuckles.

'We need to wrap his hand,' Ariadne says.

'What we need is to get inside his head before it breaks apart completely,' Dom corrects her.

Indelicate as it is, the surge of anger it evokes in Arthur is what he needs most.

'I'll go under. If he is -' choking on the implication, Arthur changes track with a grimace, 'His subconscious will respond best to me. Whatever is down there is out of control. I'll go.'

He casts around immediately, as if hoping to take up a needle there and then.

'What are you going to do?'

It might be Ariadne that asks it. All their voices have been muted to a dull static crumbling.

Arthur surprises himself with his reply.

.

.

They are gathered in Rome. There is sunshine and church bells.

Arthur brings Dom with him from LA, complete with a caseload of notes, to where Ariadne and Eames wait, patient and lost and slipping ever deeper into the stupor of delayed fright.

Yusuf joins them when Arthur calls.

Over the phone, it sounds a lot like he's been waiting for it, probably has been since they crossed paths last in Mombasa, almost a year ago.

(A year ago? More like a lifetime. Everything has changed.)

.

.

'So, he always answers to Eames?' Yusuf had asked first. 'Even when he can't remember anything else?'

.

.

'Sometimes Frederick. Sometimes Jonathan. At some point during the the dreamshare programme, the twins' wires got crossed. Retained each other's' memories, their mannerisms. They started turning into each other. At least, that's what it seems like.'

(It's hard to admit. It sticks in Arthur's throat like glue over gravel.)

.

.

'Eventually, Jonathan Faulker, who according to Alice Moraity had a harder time taking to what they called the _transfer,_ shot his brother in the chest and then killed himself in a psychotic episode. Not his first. Less than a year later, Frederick disappeared, and Eames came along.'

.

.

'Yes, but what are you going to do?'

.

.

Arthur has never looked for Lieutenant Grahame Jenson, who saved his life and saved his mind and Arthur could only avenge by trashing up as much of the military software as he could on his way out. He can't bear to find out what shattered ruins remain of the man he loved as a brother.

Perhaps he should, when this is over. If he can bring Eames back, maybe he can face an older demon still.

.

.

(Only if he can bring Eames back, though. Because if he can't, Arthur might not ever do anything again.)

.

.

'I'm going to erase Jonathan from Eames' mind. I'm going to take back what they put in there when they made him.'

.

.

 **(the dying of the light)**

.

.

Arthur opens his eyes to the dim of the night. The dream swims into focus like the tentative lens of a camera.

It's hot inside Eames' mind, stifling like the desert, and the air is too dry.

There are floorboards beneath his feet that rumble with termites and creak beneath his feet like an old Victorian house, but in the shadow shapes muted blue with starlight he recognises an army barracks.

The uniform right angles and routine symmetry, even in the dark the air tastes of rules and regimes.

He takes a cautious step towards the nearest bed.

It's neatly made, and there's an envelope at the foot of it. In a neat, looping swirl is says _Jonathan._

Arthur reaches down, but before his fingers can brush the creamy laid paper a voice behind him interrupts, shy and silky, its tone so perfectly familiar it stirs deep in Arthur's gut, down to his groin and tearing through to his tailbone.

'I wouldn't do that if I were you. He's very particular about his letters.'

Arthur turns around, and the breath he hadn't realised was trapped like a bird in his lungs loosens, and falls from his lips in a long, drawn out word.

' _Eames.'_

The man before him is young. There's boyishness in his wiry frame and unlined face, clean shaven, and his hair is horribly short. But he suits the army fatigues in an unexpected way.

He frowns at the name, though.

'Frederick,' Arthur corrects himself. The name feels foreign in his mouth, but it falls over this young man elegantly. He relaxes into it, as closely knit into his being as his skin.

Arthur clears his throat.

'Is he here?' he asks.

Frederick twitches an eyebrow and casts a lazy glance around the empty gloom of the barracks, the creaking silence and the muted darkness.

'Oh, I suppose so,' he sighs. 'He usually is. Prowling somewhere.' Frederick shrugs, and all the shifting, fidgeting edges of his frame that Arthur has grown used to seeing in his body and face strip away like peeling paint. He is quiet and still, and he watches Arthur like a friendly, curious predator.

And it sends a shock through Arthur because there, right there in that stillness, is the Eames he once knew, before all this mess started. The calm, solid presence that he'd always thought lay in his bulk and the large lines of his muscles, but it's here in this youthful thing, this lean stretch of quiet smiles and thin hips.

'Do you know who I am?' Arthur asks.

Frederick smiles kindly, and despite that young smooth face, Arthur feels like a child trapped in the stare of an adult's patronisation. He blushes.

'You're Arthur,' Frederick replies, as coolly as he knows night from day. His accent is harder, more clipped, but his tone is unchanged, the same rich silk.

But there's something missing, Arthur realises. More than the stubble and the pomade and the paisley shirts. His smile is reserved, cheerless, and he might know Arthur's name but he doesn't look at him the way Arthur wants him to.

It makes him afraid of what he'll find inside that letter, or if he goes through the door at the end of the room.

'He locked us away, see,' Frederick says abruptly, interrupting the magnetic pull of the door drawing Arthur in. 'He was ashamed, I guess.'

'Of you?'

Frederick shrugs.

'He was already changing. Before Jon killed himself. They both were. Jon couldn't handle it. So he topped himself.'

Arthur takes a step closer, to see the tiny imperfections in the skin of this man, this boy. How old was Eames when he left the army? He doesn't know. In fact, he's not entirely sure how old Eames is now.

'But you could,' he whispers. 'Handle it,' he adds as an afterthought.

Frederick shakes his head, frustrated, and cups Arthur's face gently.

A cold thrill trickles down Arthur's spine.

'You haven't been paying attention, love,' Frederick says sadly, a little more like Eames, a little less. Though his aftershave is unfamiliar, it doesn't quite hide the overwhelmingly familiar scent of his skin. Arthur leans into those cradling hands. 'I'm not him,' he insists, his fingers in Arthur's hair, his thumbs on his cheeks. 'He's neither of us, and he's both of us. I died the same as Jon. My body just, kept going.'

'But we can fix it,' Arthur says desperately, fisting the front of his crisp shirt. 'I'm here so I can fix it.'

'Why do you want to?' Frederick asks with a bewildered smile. 'He won't be the man you ever knew. He won't go back to before the changes you started to notice. If you even succeed, he'll go back to…'

'To you,' Arthur finishes in a whisper, lifting a hand up to take hold of Frederick's wrist.

'To me,' the young man nods slowly, incredulously. 'Could you do that? If it even works. If you even can. He might not love you anymore. _I_ might not love you. Or you might not want _me._ How do you know you fell in love with Frederick, not Jonathan?'

It burns, in his throat and in his eyes and in his stomach. Arthur blinks, and takes a tighter hold of Frederick's wrist, feels the bones beneath his skin and the fluttering pulse in his veins.

'That's a risk I have to take,' he chokes.

'You'll undo all the hard work he put into himself,' Frederick scolds, barely teasing. 'Do you think it's easy, building a whole person out of the shattered remains of two incomplete persons?'

Arthur smiles and laughter warm and hysterical bubbles out of him. He sounds so much like Eames, and for the first time he feels the glow of hope somewhere in the pit that grief has been digging into his sternum. He feels almost certain he loves _this_ man.

If he stays much longer, though, he won't be able to tear himself away.

'I have to go,' he says.

'You don't.'

'Yes, I do.' Arthur grits his teeth and peels Frederick's fingers out of their grip on his face. 'I have to go,' he whispers.

The rustling silence is incredibly precious, and it shivers as he moves towards the door.

Frederick watches him leave.

'Don't trust a word he says,' the young man warns. 'He's a liar.'

Arthur looks back over his shoulder. 'Aren't you?' he grins.

Frederick frowns, shakes his head, and his breath is loud.

'No. Yes. But it's not the same.'

Arthur's almost at the door. He turns back, then, to survey the cold, empty barracks, and the young man trapped in its walls, the man he's going to wake up to, with over a decade past and still a quiet, prowling predator of dreams.

He smiles reassuringly, and shakes his head.

He opens his mouth to soothe his fears, but before he can speak the darkness strangles his words and swallows him whole.

And then he falls.

.

.

 _Who stitched this up?_

Me.

 _You? How in god's name did you reach far enough around –_

I'm flexible.

 _Sweet god, darling, I know, but this is obscene. You've done more damage than the knife did._

I have not.

 _You are in no fit state to argue. Christ. It's probably going to get infected. Take it off._

Excuse me?

 _Clothes off. Go stand in the bath._

Eames.

 _What?_

Thanks.

 _Fuck off. I don't want to hear it. Go stand in the bath before I clout you._

.

.

The darkness groans, and his eyes close, and when he opens them again he's standing on a pebbled coast.

The waves lick the shoreline in sweeping _whooshes_ that clack the stones together, and the seagulls scream and dive in the salty grey air. There's a pier to his left bustling with lights, and to his right he can still make out the fixtures of an old, long abandoned pier.

Arthur has been here before, in reality.

In dreams, or at least in this dream, Brighton's beach glitters strange shades of green and pink, and there is rain in the air that never seems to reach the ground.

Beneath his feet, which are he realises bare and cold, shoes and socks in hand, the pebbles rattle.

Brighton is ghostly, twilit, and Arthur casts his gaze up and down the horizon.

Then he runs, shoes and socks falling to the ground, and plunges into the icy sea.

.

.

 _They are younger. They eat ice cream._

 _Eames makes Arthur eat falafel, even though Arthur hates falafel._

 _Arthur eats the falafel even though he hates it just to see the wondrous surprise on Eames' face._

 _They feed the seagulls even though they're probably not supposed to._

 _The bruises from their last job fade. They heal tenderly. It's the first time, for so many reasons._

 _One day Eames says:_

' _Got a job in Birmingham, darling. Join me?'_

 _Arthur wishes he'd said yes with every fibre of his being._

 _Instead he flew back to the States alone._

 _He should've gone to Birmingham._

.

.

The current is strong, and Arthur is breathless as he swims through the sickly grey sea towards Brighton's old pier.

It isn't how he remembers seeing it from afar, years ago. It's busy with seagulls and creaking, and as he approaches it seems less a pier and more a fortress, all rusting metal and ladders and beams spreading and spidering out in every direction.

He gasps and spits out a mouthful of seawater, and with a stretching desperate hand he grabs the lowest rung of the nearest ladder, clinging to it desperately.

His skin feels thinner in the cold, and the metal screws and edges dig into him painfully as he heaves and splutters his way up up up, until he's completely surfaced, and the waves jump and snatch at his scrambling heels.

Once he's up and out, he clambers over the rubble of broken splintering beams until he reaches a flat sheet of metal that might once have been strong, but has now been eroded with salt and wind and time. He sits and gasps. The sea is burning in his eyes and nostrils, scratching the back of his throat.

Pushing the hair out of his face, he stares along the shoreline, the thin trail of sea foam lining the coast and the buildings curving along the street, all unfamiliar, boarded shut.

The new pier flashes and blinks with coloured lights.

Behind him he can hear the damp patter of bare feet on wet metal coming closer, ever closer.

He waits until the sound stops, and he can feel the heat of another body standing behind him, almost touching. For a moment he thinks maybe he's going to get kicked off, back into the sea.

But then the man steps to the side, and comes down to sit next to him instead, their legs dangling off the side so that the tallest, angriest waves barely scrape their toes.

Arthur tilts his head a little, and looks at the man beside him.

'Jonathan?' he asks, and curses himself inwardly.

Jonathan grins. He isn't much larger than Frederick, but he seems to take up an inordinate amount of space anyway. He's young, too, of course, and like his twin his smile is cheerless, the ghostly youth of something Arthur covets like fire, masochistic and brave.

His eyes, bright and grey, almost green reflecting the tormented sea, are wild.

'Come to kill me, darling?' he asks.

And this isn't at all like Frederick. They are the same, the honeyed voice and that goddamn face, smooth and young and yet still _his_ face, his lips and his cheekbones and the tip of his nose, but when Jonathan says it, cocks his head thoughtfully and parts his lips and frowns gently even as his eyes glitter with delight, something inside Arthur shatters irreparably.

Frederick had been right. He can't possibly know which half of Eames he fell in love with first. Because the expression on Jonathan's face is so familiar, so painfully familiar. It conjures something fierce in Arthur's chest, more than hope and more than heat.

 _Go to sleep, Mister Eames._

'He wouldn't have survived without me, you know,' Jonathan says, a knowing smile fluttering in his expression that tells Arthur he knows exactly how deeply he's cutting. 'It was their plan all along, what happened. Break us down. Remake us. They'd have had two carbon copies of the same forger. All Frederick's clever reservation and all my reckless instinct in one body. Isn't that wonderful?'

It filters like sarcasm, the delicate pinpricks of disdain that Eames was always so good at throwing out like sweets.

Arthur thinks he knows now where Eames gathered all his nastiness. The mean streak he subscribed to when chance allowed and need dictated.

Eames has killed before, once in cold blood, and Arthur loves him all the same because that's the life they both signed up to.

Will that disappear, without Jonathan locked away, driving his malice with an iron fist in his mind? Will the times Eames chose to walk away, the inexplicable merciful reluctance he had displayed, become the bulk of his decisions?

Arthur tries to ignore the fact that Eames will be dead within the year, if this is the case.

Arthur tries to ignore the urge to back out now, to leap into the sea and keep swimming, to wrap his hands around Jonathan's face and kiss him until they fall into nothingness.

He is interrupted before he can decide by the object of his concern.

Jonathan heaves a sigh, like a parent mentally preparing to reduce himself to the inane chatter of children.

'Come with me,' he says wearily, pulling Arthur up roughly by the elbow so that he has to scramble to keep from falling off the edge of the frame.

'Where?' Arthur asks as he's tugged deeper into the labyrinth of scaffolding.

'To the start,' Jonathan says, looking confused. The neat corners of his frown are positively kissable. 'If you're going to get rid of me, you need to get rid of it all, you twat.'

.

.

They delve into the creaking folds of Brighton's pier, until the sea is a distant memory and Arthur is well and truly lost. He thinks he can smell his own cologne in the nameless breeze, though he hasn't worn any in days.

And then they are here, confronted by a solid door. The handle is warm when Arthur grips it, twists it sharply and they are pulled in by a maelstrom of terrific energy, like terror. Like love.

'Here we are,' says a voice that might be Jonathan's but when Arthur turns his head he sees he is alone.

And then there is this.

A neat bed and a young man with his deft fingers sliding over the cool lines of a gun that doesn't fit with the rest of his military fatigues. Maybe he pinched it.

Military greens and sandy hair still damp from the shower.

Behind Arthur, the door bursts open and in storms another young man, whose face is the same, clean shaven and full lipped and rosy.

'What the _bloody hell_ , Freddie,' the intruder bellows. 'Moraity is _furious!_ We've been working on that landscape for months! It was damn near perfect. Cowling was actually pleased for once. How could you –'

He's gesticulating wildly, and the first man just sits in wonder, staring at his twin as if seeing him for the first time.

'Can't you hear yourself?' he croaks, as if he's been screaming anywhere but inside his own mind. _'Freddie?_ You're fucking Freddie, mate. Not me! Jesus H. Christ.'

He gets to his feet, anger bubbling up through him in his voice, and he's close to shouting before he realises it, and it bursts from his throat like blood.

'You're so fucking pathetic. You follow these shitheads, do everything little fucking thing they say and for what? You are _cracking up_ , Frederick. We both are. You're encouraging it! And you ask me what the fuck's the matter?'

Frederick finally seems to notice the gun in his brother's hand, because he blanches, takes an automatic step back.

Arthur, silent, holds his breath.

'Oh yeah,' Jonathan barks, waving the gun in his brother's flinching face.. 'You'll listen now, won't you? It's the only thing that'll fucking work anymore. They've torn you apart too many times. They've got inside your head so deep you don't have a fucking clue anymore, do you? You're gone. But you know what? I can fix that.'

The cocking of the gun is thunderous, and Frederick's hands fly up in front of his torso as his words come out in stuttering coughs.

'Jon – no – what – what are you doing – no – Jon – this is real – real – Jon – it's real – we're not dreaming – I won't wake up – Jon –'

Jonathan's eyes, as grey as a ghostly ocean storm and glassy with tears, are dead already.

'You're a fucking child, Freddie. You always were,' he says. His hand shakes with the weight of the gun. 'I'm so sorry.'

Freddie's protest is silenced by the shot, which sends him barrelling backwards into the door, where he crumples, his breath stolen so his scream comes out as a rasp of desperate, plunging airlessness.

Jon does not turn the gun on himself just yet, though, as Arthur had expected.

He crouches beside his brother, puts a hand in his hair and smoothes it down.

'We've been dead for years, mate,' he says softly, leans down to kiss his brother's brow.

The gun finds its way to the soft underside of his chin, and when he pulls the trigger his fingers are still in Frederick's hair.

.

.

Nobody comes this time, not in the dream. There is only death, here, now.

Frederick's breath gasps into tiny panting breath as he turns blue and grey and all the blood he can spare spills out, and then the rest follows.

Their mangled bodies are wrapped together, overlaid like crippled jenga blocks.

'It would've been better this way,' a voice says.

Jonathan stares down at his own corpse, at the almost corpse of his brother.

Arthur, who has somehow found his way down to the floor, lets the pooling blood reach his knees and hands without moving.

'Do you really think that?' he asks, and that hurts more than he'd expect.

He'd like to think something was worth it. Dreams, or art, or Mombasa, or whisky on the rocks.

(Actually, Arthur would really like to think that he was worth it, but he can't quite formulate that thought in his head. Not now. Not yet.)

Jonathan seems to hear it anyway.

'Eames loves you, you know. It's how he buried us so far down, kept us at bay. You did a lot of good.'

'But not enough,' Arthur scoffs.

On the floor, Frederick's eyes shutter and close, and the twitching that ripples outwards from his body in every direction softens to stillness.

'No. Not enough,' Jonathan agrees bluntly.

'How can I get rid of you?' Arthur despairs, more to the corpse before him than the person behind him. Jonathan's fingers trace the nape of his neck, and Arthur feels a chill wash over his own body like death.

He tilts his head up to look at the face he loves wearing an expression he's come to hate, a hard edged concentration, resigned to nothingness.

'Can you kill me, love?' Jonathan asks, looks older, more like Eames which isn't fair, not fair at all, but whoever heard of a malignant ghost going easily?

Arthur knows, logically, he's killed Eames before. He's shot him in the head, in the heart. Once, memorably and quite unfortunately, he'd hate to slit his throat to kick him out of the dream. Drowned him twice, and all.

The difference in this moment is astounding. It restrains Arthur like shackles tying him down and stretching him out in every direction until he's vulnerable in all the ways he's never allowed himself to be.

'It can't be that easy,' Arthur replies with a watery smile.

There's nothing remotely easy about this.

'Simple,' he corrects himself.

The air feels hotter than it did when he first came down into the depths of Eames' mind, and Arthur tries not to think about the sweat on Eames' brow up above, his broken knuckles, the fever and the bloody eyebrow.

'You forget he's my brother,' Jonathan says, deadly, his voice glittering with frost.

'You tried to kill him,' Arthur spits, and his hands slip further into the pool of bloody proof.

'I tried to save him,' Jonathan shrugs, like it's the same thing.

(And it is, Arthur thinks to himself, when he looks into a face he loves and sees an expression he hates. Perhaps Arthur should have done the same, only better, actually succeeded where Jonathan failed. Instead he's been dragging Eames kicking and screaming through a life that cannot be lived, because it is no life.

Arthur is selfish by nature. He covets and he lies and he steals and he loves.)

Arthur stands up, reaches down to pull the gun from the dead Jonathan's stiff, damp grasp.

Jonathan steps into his space, takes hold of Arthur's hand over the gun and holds it up to his temple. He smiles.

'Are you sure, darling?' he asks. There are gentle lines around his eyes, now, and stubble on his jaw. The army fatigues look lighter, and so does his hair.

Arthur kisses him, prises his mouth open with a wet, tangling tongue and bites his lips furiously, just in case it's his last chance.

He pulls back, can barely see the face through the tears but the warm hand is still covering his, fingers knotted together over the trigger and he chokes.

'Come back,' he says, not sure if it's begging or ordering.

He pulls the trigger a second time in his own mouth before the body can hit the floor.

.

.

 _Darling, sorry I never called. I'm in Glasgow. Fucking shithole that it is. Actually, no. That's not true. I bloody love Glasgow. The Scots are great. I just – miss you. God, let's never speak of this again, alright? I'm just pissed – pissed and pissed off and, yeah. I really, really bloody miss you. I know we agreed, and I know it's for – the best and all but – I don't agree. I don't fucking agree one fucking bit. I miss you. I want you. I – bloody love you, Arthur. So will you just get on a goddamn plane and come to Scotland because I might die if I don't see you. Well, I don't think I could stop at just seeing you. So fly out to Scotland and get in my bed and – fuck. I'm sorry. I won't – just call me, ok? I don't care. I don't care anymore. Life is too fucking short for this bullshit, Arthur. Come back._

.

.

 **(going gently)**

.

.

Arthur opens his eyes.

Light streams through the slats in the Italian shutters, rosy and soft.

He turns his head on the pillow, his muscles creaking up his neck. He blinks, and the buttery skinned shape of Eames comes into focus. He can feel the digging of the needle in the thin crease of his elbow as he pulls himself a little more upright, to study the sleeping lines of Eames' face.

Eames wakes, bleary eyed and tender, the rise and fall of his chest quickening as he blinks. There's a bruise on his brow, a deep and violent shade of purple that Arthur wants to kiss better.

Arthur waits, watches his lover lick his lips slowly, the light spilling in thin strips over the wires of his frame.

'Darling,' Eames says, as if afraid to break the crystal of their silence.

There is radiance, here, like a sea of brightest blue. And Arthur shall wade into it, gentle as the storm.

.

.


End file.
